Current recycling systems for wastepaper are generally inefficient. Less than forty (40) percent of wastepaper is generally collected for recycling. The remaining wastepaper is used primarily for landfills and the like. The six commonly accepted groups of paper are printing/writing, newspaper, cardboard, box board, packaging, and tissue paper. Instead of recycling, most of these groups of wastepaper eventually become landfill material.
The problems associated with recycling wastepaper are caused by the difficulty in collecting and handling the wastepaper, the added expense of the sorting operation and the difficult and costly problem of deinking the wastepaper for reuse. Past deink methods result in their own inherent problems such as producing highly caustic polluting chemicals. Furthermore, most of the recycled wastepaper that has been deinked has been generally limited to reuse only as a lower grade paper, or as tissue paper. Most high printing/writing grades of wastepaper are not deinked for reuse as a high grade recycled writing/printing paper pulp.
Current methods for supplying high grade paper are usually limited to virgin wood pulp which results in the cutting of forests. Furthermore, sources of fresh wood material are already becoming exhausted in many countries throughout the world. While at the same time there is a growing need for all grades of paper products throughout the world. Also, the electricity requirements and thus oil imports to run the electrical generators can require approximately 16 kilowatt hours (KWH) per ton for changing virgin wood into paper, where as it only requires 5 KWH per recycled paper ton.
In the near future, a new enzymatic technique that is nonpolluting holds promise to allow for the deinking of most grades of paper including printing/writing grades for reuse as high grade writing paper. However, present methods do not allow for adequate recycling of most wastepaper grades.
The current prior art techniques for processing wastepaper are inadequate for sorting. These patents are primarily limited to pulping and shredding type operations and not primarily to sorting. See U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,017,033 to Tra; 4,123,489 to Kelly; 4,334,984 to Vagac et al.; 4,867,383 to Terry et al.; 5,184,780 to Wiens; and 5,197,678 to Trezek et al. These prior art systems generally sort and thus recycle less than forty (40) percent of wastepaper for later reuse.
Thus, the need exists for a system to efficiently and economically allow for the sorting of all grades of wastepaper for recycling purposes.